Re: [Marxism] The Paris Commune
POSTING RULES NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * I don't agree with Professor Marliere's counterposing of 'the good artistic, internationalist, libertarian communism' of the commune vs. the 'harshly authoritarian and militaristic centralism' supposedly advocated by Marx and Lenin. Back in September 1870 Marx, on behalf of the First International, had advised that it would be folly to attempt a workers insurrection in Paris against the French government. The revolutionary and socialist minded Parisian workers were mainly followers of Proudhonist ideas of reformist and utopian socialism. Even if they had had the level of political understanding and organization necessary to lead an effective revolutionary struggle, Marx could see that the international balance of forces dictated their defeat. The socialist-minded workers of Paris let a whole six months go by without organizing and initiating serious ongoing revolutionary struggle. With de facto control of Paris they could have taken control of the national bank and other central levers of power. They could have taken the political initiative to militarily attack the Thiers government instead of waiting to be attacked. In March 1871 when workers, led by the central committee of the National Guard, did resist the French government's initial attempts to regain control of Paris and initiated the struggle known as the Paris Commune, Marx gave their struggle his full support. Marx did note afterward that their decision to transfer revolutionary leadership from the central committee of the National Guard to the elected 'artistic, internationalist, libertarian' loose commune of local representatives was a self-defeating political step backward. To illustrate by continuing my exaggeration, i think we of the 60s generation can understand the change in leadership as something like the difference between the political leftist activists and the counterculture hippie communalists. I read John Merriman's new book on the commune, Massacre: The Life and Death of the Paris Commune of 1871. I don't recommend it to socialists who already know about the commune. It is practically apolitical, rubbing your face in the blood and gore of the government's repression and re-conquest of Paris - while making sure to play up every bloody response from the commune side. I am not taking issue with Marliere's evaluation of that book - except that he ignores Merriman's recounting of the commune's poorly organized and sloppy defense. These points illustrate - contra Marliere - that the commune could have used strong centralized military leadership. Of course Marx's main lesson about the Paris Commune was succinctly repeated from The Civil War in France in the preface to the 1872 German edition of The Communist Manifesto: One thing especially was proved by the Commune, namely, that 'the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made State machinery, and wield it for its own purposes.' (btw I think that this major 1870s post-Commune correction to the Communist Manifesto is hard to explain for those who have argued on this list that Marx and Engels had already solved all strategic issues of socialist revolution in 1848) Marx felt that the Commune might have saved itself had it dealt more harshly with its political opponents and centralised all powers and institutions in the hands of a revolutionary organisation. After 1871, this was the issue that divided Marxists and anarchists. Lenin’s militarist conception of political action and the vanguard party was at odds with the anarchist approach, which advocated a general strike followed by the immediate dismantling of the state by decentralised workers’ councils. In this respect the Commune was far more in tune with anarchist culture than with orthodox Marxism. Marx, Engels and Lenin criticised the Communards for failing to take over capitalist institutions – for instance, the assets of the French banks were not confiscated – and thought they showed ‘excessive magnanimity’ in dealing with counter-revolutionary agents, saboteurs and spies. They also believed the Commune paid too little attention to military training and discipline. The philosophy that prevailed among the Communards had more to do with Rousseauian ideas of freedom and true democracy. Although the Commune only lasted 72 days, it shouldn’t be regarded as a political failure but as a time of intense solidarity – an aspect the Marxist interpretation tends to underplay. In fact, the Communards were the first genuine internationalists: Reclus, Lefrançais, Verlaine, Vermersch, Rimbaud, Vaillant and Lafargue were exiled to London or Geneva and met with like-minded supporters.
Re: [Marxism] The Paris Commune
POSTING RULES NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * Dayne wrote, I read John Merriman's new book on the commune, Massacre: The Life and Death of the Paris Commune of 1871. I don't recommend it to socialists who already know about the commune. The problem is, of course, that very few people who actually wants to know about the Commune ever seem to get to the point where they decide that they already know about the commune--or, at least, enough to forego reading something new on it . . . particularly if it takes a very different approach than they've read so far. And if you don't want a book that focuses on bloodshed, you probably shouldn't have picked up one with the title Massacre. . Those of us who are still reading on the subject are surely aware that Robert Tombs has begun promoting a new understanding of the Commune, deemphasizing the bloodiness of its repression, going so far as to argue that the Left has historically exaggerated the numbers to portray capitalism as a particularly bloody and repressive system. In that context, Merriman's book is a real contribution. The Commune was anything but a simple affair. Like everything in the real world, it was terribly confused, contradictory, and worthy of more reading . . . . ML _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] The Paris Commune
POSTING RULES NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * Touche! Mark, point taken; i am usually more sensitive to our need to 'live and learn', Dayne On Sat, Jun 27, 2015 at 1:45 PM, Mark Lause markala...@gmail.com wrote: Dayne wrote, I read John Merriman's new book on the commune, Massacre: The Life and Death of the Paris Commune of 1871. I don't recommend it to socialists who already know about the commune. The problem is, of course, that very few people who actually wants to know about the Commune ever seem to get to the point where they decide that they already know about the commune--or, at least, enough to forego reading something new on it . . . particularly if it takes a very different approach than they've read so far. And if you don't want a book that focuses on bloodshed, you probably shouldn't have picked up one with the title Massacre. . Those of us who are still reading on the subject are surely aware that Robert Tombs has begun promoting a new understanding of the Commune, deemphasizing the bloodiness of its repression, going so far as to argue that the Left has historically exaggerated the numbers to portray capitalism as a particularly bloody and repressive system. In that context, Merriman's book is a real contribution. The Commune was anything but a simple affair. Like everything in the real world, it was terribly confused, contradictory, and worthy of more reading . . . . _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] The Paris Commune
POSTING RULES NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * London Review of Books, Vol. 37 No. 13 · 2 July 2015 Globalisation before Globalisation by Philippe Marlière Massacre: The Life and Death of the Paris Commune of 1871 by John Merriman Yale, 324 pp, £20.00, October 2014, ISBN 978 0 300 17452 6 Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune by Kristin Ross Verso, 148 pp, £16.99, March, ISBN 978 1 78168 839 7 Lenin, it’s said, danced in the snow once the Bolshevik government had lasted a day longer than the Paris Commune. He was in awe of the Communards, and his tomb is still decorated with red banners from the Commune, brought for his funeral by French communists. Though it lasted only 72 days, the Commune was a defining moment for the European left, though not an uncontroversial one. Marx praised it in The Civil War in France (1871) – ‘Its martyrs are enshrined in the great heart of the working class’ – but in 1872 in a new preface to The Communist Manifesto he wrote: ‘The working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery and wield it for their own purpose.’ The Communards, he believed, had made a crucial error by seeking to reform, rather than abolish, the state. Engels agreed, calling the Commune the first ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, a state run by workers in their own interest. The argument about its political nature still hasn’t been settled 144 years after the Commune itself was crushed. Some see it as the first self-consciously socialist uprising: a popular rebellion, unlike the liberal and nationalist Revolutions of 1830 and 1848. Others describe it as one among many manifestations of French republicanism. The Yale historian John Merriman’s new book concentrates on the chain of events that created the Commune, and the main players behind its formation. He opens with a description of Paris in 1870: its western side a playground for the rich, the east an overpopulated slum. The class divide was deep and class consciousness entrenched. In July that year, Napoleon III, desperate for military glory, declared war on Prussia, his generals having assured him that France would win easily. They were wrong. As soon as the fighting started, Prussian troops routed the French and on 2 September captured the emperor together with 100,000 troops in Sedan. There were mass demonstrations on the streets of Paris demanding the overthrow of the empire, and its replacement with a democratic republic. Moderate republicans were terrified and on 4 September established a new republic. The s0-called Government of National Defence promised not to cede an inch of territory to the Prussians; but it feared the radicalised working class in the capital even more, and decided that it would be wise to surrender to Bismarck as soon as possible. Secret negotiations were opened soon after the Prussians laid siege to Paris on 19 September. As the weeks went by, hostility to the new government grew. On 28 October, news reached Paris that the 160,000 soldiers at Metz had surrendered. On 31 October, 15,000 demonstrators gathered at the Hôtel de Ville in Paris calling for the resignation of the government and the establishment of a Commune and a Committee of Public Safety, such as there had been in 1792. Food was running out and so was money; on 29 January the government surrendered, as it had been planning to do since the beginning of the siege. The right-wing député Adolphe Thiers was appointed president by the National Assembly and given a mandate to accept and implement the harsh terms imposed, which included ceding Alsace and Lorraine to Prussia. In March, the Prussians paraded through Paris. They occupied part of the city for two days, then withdrew. The surrender to the Prussians and the threat of monarchist restoration led to a transformation of the National Guard. A Central Committee of the Federation of National Guards was elected, comprising 215 battalions, equipped with 2000 cannons and 450,000 firearms. Thiers’s new government embodied a conservative brand of republicanism. He had been prime minister under Louis-Philippe’s July Monarchy in 1836, 1840 and 1848, and was later a fierce opponent of Napoleon III. He was far from being the kind of leader the Parisian militants wanted in power. Thiers had promised the conservative députés in the National Assembly that the monarchy would be restored. His first task was to undermine the newly empowered National Guard, which had the militants’ support and controlled the city’s 2000 cannons. For Thiers and the national army amassing in Versailles, this represented a grave threat to the new order. On 18 March
